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This time I can't compare it to the light novel since I never read this far (the anime was announced at this point so i stopped reading) and I think that's a good thing in a way. It puts a little bit of pressure off. This was definitely a bit of a breather episode but I think they simply packed in too much, which is why the time flew by so quickly. Archibald being killed like that was a bit anti-climactic (the bad kind not the good Game of Thrones kind) so i hope that wasn't the end for him. I think the best bit was Kotomine talking to Gil. That was one intersting conversation and it's just great watching what develops Kotomine into the psychopath in FSN. It's interesting to note that he's still very strongly religious about good and evil so it'll be interesting how that gets twisted into moral relativity. But I guess you can't ask for a better tutor than Gilgamesh in moral relitivity.

Most of the time, it would be the broadcaster's worries that leads to the censorship, rather than the anime companies.

Good thing Iri was driving in the countryside. Can you imagine how awkward it would be for her and Saber to be locked up in prison for knocking down someone? Who's going to bail them out? Kiritsugu?

Never had a bomb explosion been presented in such a positive light...

I wouldn't say positive. I think there was a scene where Kiritsugu was looking at a parent and her child crying who just lost their homes. It was subtle but guilt was definitely there.

Another reallly good episode. Ufotable is suddenly doing a fantastic job with Fate when they screwed up the first two adaptation so badly.

As for Archibald, I never read the novels but I am damn sure he is not dead. You can hear Lancer's voice in the the preview of the next episode. Lancer class are not like Archer class that can survive without their master so I'm pretty darn sure they lived.

You could almost swap in my commentary on last weeks episode with this one since I feel about the same way about both of them, but I'll try to make some bullet point notes to differentiate a little bit:

- The production values for this show are great, I'll give it that unconditionally, but the screenplay is so far extremely dull to me save for some of the action pieces with Saber.

- Most of the dialogue so far in this series seems to be either jargon or stating the extremely obvious. "This grenade was thrown by someone else", "Joy is not a quality I have", "You have an advantage over other masters". Is there a reason for dialogue points like this to be this drawn out? Some of them might be interesting if most of this cast wasn't so dry and lifeless.

- Of the main cast, so far the only ones that I don't find dreadfully uninteresting as characters continue to be Irisviel and Saber. The scenes early on with them where Caster mistook Saber for Jeanne D'Arc were unsurprisingly the highlights of the episode for me.

- The supporting cast blows the main cast out of the water so far in this show in terms of interesting personalities and motivations. Kiritsgu, Kotomine, Gilgamesh and Tokiomi are almost impossibly boring and dry to me at this point such that when their scenes come up I tend to zone out. This is a huge problem going forward since they are likely to get the bulk of the focus and unless something really changes I'm not sure how I can be pressed to care about what happens to any of them.

- The rivalry between Kiritsgu and Kotomine, two characters that the show desperately wants to convince us are idealistic opposites is so far one of the weakest I've seen in an anime like this in a while. I think this owes to both of them being about as dry as a log that's just spent an hour or two in a bonfire. As such I could not possibly be less interested in seeing their eventual squaring off right now if I tried. This should not be the case where the main protagonist and antagonist are easily the most boring characters in the show to me. This is a huge problem.

- This show suffers greatly whenever Rider isn't in the cast for an episode. Irisviel and Saber tried their hardest to pick up the slack, but unfortunately just can't overcome Kotomine and Kiritsgu's screen time. Frankly I'm not sure even Rider could, they are just that dull and lifeless that they'd probably suck all his energy of the scene even still.

- The introduction of a wrinkle into His Excellency Lord Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald Jr. Esquire of England in that he has help much like Kiritsgu makes the potential for the inevitable battle between Waver and him all the more interesting. Hopefully they get to that soon so we can have more Rider and Kiritsgu and Kotomine can go back to sleep for a while since they seem awfully bored and tired with everything that's not going on.

-Gilgamesh actually had a scene that wasn't just him being a smug asshole. WTF?! More of these please, it will really help his character a lot.

That's about it really. I think if a few characters just pick it up already I'll be far more into this show, but it has to happen soon as we're now halfway through the first season.

Lol at the hotel employee staring at Kiritsugu for a few seconds prolly wondering how'd someone that obviously looks Japanese ended up with a name like that. XD

Nice ep to develop characters though. It does feel like they're trying to include too many characters and scenes in one short ep that it doesn't flow smmothly when it comes to episodes like this. From the moment I saw Saber in the beginning, I'm sure there won't be another scene with her again because of the short timing and large cast.

As with most novel adaptations, they tend to leave out characters inner thoughts / monologue, which doesn't exactly work out well for Kiritsugu IMO. As most of the reasons for what he does is usually explained in his thoughts. Though for this episode, I suppose some of it can be implied from him staring at the parent and the child. (The parent and child look just like Iri and Illya )

But you would had never guessed that he was calling himself weak, questioning himself why did he set a fire in the hotel to evacuate everyone before bombing the whole place. That if he was the man he was 9 years ago, he would have just blew up the hotel and killed all those people.

- The supporting cast blows the main cast out of the water so far in this show in terms of interesting personalities and motivations. Kiritsgu, Kotomine, Gilgamesh and Tokiomi are almost impossibly boring and dry to me at this point such that when their scenes come up I tend to zone out. This is a huge problem going forward since they are likely to get the bulk of the focus and unless something really changes I'm not sure how I can be pressed to care about what happens to any of them.

- The rivalry between Kiritsgu and Kotomine, two characters that the show desperately wants to convince us are idealistic opposites is so far one of the weakest I've seen in an anime like this in a while. I think this owes to both of them being about as dry as a log that's just spent an hour or two in a bonfire. As such I could not possibly be less interested in seeing their eventual squaring off right now if I tried. This should not be the case where the main protagonist and antagonist are easily the most boring characters in the show to me. This is a huge problem..

To be fair I think we are just starting to see Emiya and Kotomine in action. Iris empathsized on Emiya's "ideals" a lot, but we have not seen what his ideals really are. So far we see that Emiya is a caring father and mage-killing specialist. Surely he will be covered in much greater detail in later episodes.

Kotomine is never easy to understand, and even harder to connect to the audience. Episode 1 and 6 tried to explain him, but I still fail to understand this man, other than the repeatedly-stated lack of desire and joy. It's still a mystery to me why he is so interested about Emiya.

Kotomine is never easy to understand, and even harder to connect to the audience. Episode 1 and 6 tried to explain him, but I still fail to understand this man, other than the repeatedly-stated lack of desire and joy. It's still a mystery to me why he is so interested about Emiya.

Yeah I didn't get him at all in Fate/Stay Night either, though that show managed to lose me completely towards the end on account of the rushed pacing and over the top portrayal of events so that's not exactly a surprise. So far this experience is the exact opposite in that it's losing me early on account of the pacing being slow and the events portrayed being on the dull side, but I kind of expect to get back into a little later.

Yeah I didn't get him at all in Fate/Stay Night either, though that show managed to lose me completely towards the end on account of the rushed pacing and over the top portrayal of events so that's not exactly a surprise. So far this experience is the exact opposite in that it's losing me early on account of the pacing being slow and the events portrayed being on the dull side, but I kind of expect to get back into a little later.

Well, that's because all of Kirei's character and motivations (and really, he is a pretty good and interesting character) are in the only route that was never animated.

And DEEN anime was pretty boring and badly paced IMHO. This is miles away to that. Even so I don't find this boring in any way and my favorite scenes of this episode were the ones with Kirei, lol.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kokukirin

Kotomine is never easy to understand, and even harder to connect to the audience. Episode 1 and 6 tried to explain him, but I still fail to understand this man, other than the repeatedly-stated lack of desire and joy. It's still a mystery to me why he is so interested about Emiya.

Well, thas was kind of covered in the first episode. Kotomine thinks that Kiritsugu is like him but that unlike him, Kiritsugu found an "answer", so he wants to know what.

- Most of the dialogue so far in this series seems to be either jargon or stating the extremely obvious. "This grenade was thrown by someone else", "Joy is not a quality I have", "You have an advantage over other masters". Is there a reason for dialogue points like this to be this drawn out? Some of them might be interesting if most of this cast wasn't so dry and lifeless.

The problem with the dialogue is that with this amount of exposition, you usually expect the script to just explain everything via dialogue.

For instance, the part where Kirei confirms that "the grenade was thrown by someone else", he looks away to ground floor. This is a visual cue that shows that Kirei was trying to confirm if it was possible to have thrown the grenade from below with that kind of trajectory. Judging from the sheer drop below, it would be impossible for a normal human. Yet, this is an ordinary smoke grenade and magi don't involve themselves with contemporary arms as explained in episode 1.

So, from just that grenade he was able to get the information he needed that Maiya didn't say, which is that there is a Magus that acts outside of the boundaries of Magi (which fits Kiritsugu's MO) and that he's involved with this woman, so she will be the key to finding him.

This could've been explained in exposition like in the novels, but for the most part the production team has decided to keep the exposition for when they actually have to explain certain concepts for the setting, and letting visual cues like Kiritsugu coming across the parent and child do the rest.

Oh god it's true, everyone on the planet is having ADD, you just can't have a good episode if no explosion or body parts flying around do you? Do you guys want Naruto that much? that every episode has to be fightan + Jitsus + cliffhanger? How about spending some times get to know your characters? This episode shows a lot of characterizations and I love every moment of it, even the so call boring dialog. The only think I can complain about it's the graphics, but I was wondering when the drop is gonna occur anyway cuz I just don't think ufotable can keep pumping movie quality episode in a 26 episode TV show.

Kotomine is never easy to understand, and even harder to connect to the audience. Episode 1 and 6 tried to explain him, but I still fail to understand this man, other than the repeatedly-stated lack of desire and joy. It's still a mystery to me why he is so interested about Emiya.

Kotomine is quite possibly the most complex character in the Fateverse, so it's only natural that people might not yet have much of a grasp on his character as of episode 6, but I felt the reason for his interest in Kiritsugu was made fairly clear in episode 1. Specifically, in the beginning of its second half, in what was easily one of my favourite scenes so far. I'll try and summarise the gist of it here.

The first thing to note is that both Kiritsugu and Kotomine followed similar paths in the earlier portions of their lives; they were both executors/heretic hunters/magus killers. Both surrounded themselves with battle and conflict in a rather obsessive manner which would appear to be devoid of self-interest to most. But the difference between them is that Kiritsugu stopped following that path and seemingly had a change of heart, once he met the Einzberns. Kotomine, who still follows said path diligently despite it providing him with no sense of fulfilment whatsoever, presumes thus that that was when Kiritsugu found his "answer". Basically, that upon joining the Einzberns Kiritsugu found his place in the world, or, as Gilgamesh put it in this episode, the form of his soul, which Kotomine has yet to discover for himself. You could say that, in a sense, Kiritsugu gives Kotomine a shred of hope that he too might be able to find something that gives him a sense of joy and purpose and fills his otherwise utterly empty and passionless soul.

And that emptiness of Kotomine is also the reason why Kiritsugu fears him in turn. As Kiritsugu remarked in the aforementioned scene, Kotomine frantically immersed himself in the mastery of many different types of magic, which, upon learning them, he then proceeds to discard like trash. He's clearly desperately searching for something, but can't seem to find it anywhere. Everything that generally gives human beings pleasure, passion and fulfilment does absolutely nothing for him and no matter what he does he remains hopelessly empty. Kiritsugu realises how dangerous a man like that can be, and thus fears him the most out of all the other Masters. But what he doesn't yet realise is that, due to their relatively similar paths in life, Kotomine also singles Kiritsugu out from the rest of the Masters, but out of interest rather than fear. Because Kotomine believes Kiritsugu found something of a value (an answer or a purpose) amidst the endless string of battles, which Kotomine himself has yet to find in his similarly chaotic life, whose path has been defined by a rigid religious upbringing and has left him with no direction or desires.

And it's due to that vested interest in Kiritsugu that Kotomine took the time to leave the Church and personally investigate and get involved in the aftermath of the Archibald building explosion, thus disobeying Tokiomi's instructions, just because he felt there was a good chance Kiritsugu would be involved. Seeking out Kiritsugu is the only thing in this Holy Grail War that Kotomine does out of actual self-interest and not just because that's what's expected of him.

That's the gist of it so far. But F/SN also goes a lot into why his is such a tortured existence, particularly, as sento said, in the one route that was never animated. Anyone looking to get the full of picture of Kotomine's in-depth character study should definitely read it if they haven't yet.

Oh god it's true, everyone on the planet is having ADD, you just can't have a good episode if no explosion or body parts flying around do you? Do you guys want Naruto that much? that every episode has to be fightan + Jitsus + cliffhanger? How about spending some times get to know your characters? This episode shows a lot of characterizations and I love every moment of it, even the so call boring dialog. The only think I can complain about it's the graphics, but I was wondering when the drop is gonna occur anyway cuz I just don't think ufotable can keep pumping movie quality episode in a 26 episode TV show.

I don't hate dialogue at all personally. Some of my favorite shows and movies of all time have been overwhelmingly dialogue driven (LOGH, Lawrence of Arabia, Patlabor 2, FLAG, the list goes on and on really) I just don't care for dry as the Sahara desert leads who don't have all that much interesting to say other than, "I don't feel joy".

What this cast needs is a lead with some charisma and personality to add weight to the dialogue and draw attention to what's being said and to flesh that dialogue out a bit. So far only Saber and Irisviel qualify to me. Like imagine a Shakespearean play where the lead actor is as wooden as a board with his delivery and seemingly not into at all and the quality of the dialogue matches said delivery in terms of dullness and you'll kind of have an idea of how I view Kiritsgu and Kotomine right now.

I'm also starting to think maybe George Nakata isn't the best voice casting for Kotomine either. I mean I love the guy like nobodies business, but he can be pretty mono-syllabic in his delivery at times and I don't think he's the kind of guy that can carry a main character with lots of dialogue, but we'll see if things get more interesting with him going forward.

TL;DR: Rider has been out of the show for one episode and I miss him desperately already. Not a good sign.

Oh god it's true, everyone on the planet is having ADD, you just can't have a good episode if no explosion or body parts flying around do you? Do you guys want Naruto that much? that every episode has to be fightan + Jitsus + cliffhanger? How about spending some times get to know your characters? This episode shows a lot of characterizations and I love every moment of it, even the so call boring dialog. The only think I can complain about it's the graphics, but I was wondering when the drop is gonna occur anyway cuz I just don't think ufotable can keep pumping movie quality episode in a 26 episode TV show.

I like how there's been multiple attempts in this thread at accusing people of short attention spans. Which is fine, I mean after all, people have different attention spans, though throwing around and trivializing a possibly debilitating condition and using it to generalize a group of people seems to be a bit too much it seems.

If you were gonna insult people like this, you shouldn't accuse them of preferring Naruto, since if anything that requires more patience than this. Perhaps the world doesn't work in such binaries?

Also, I like how you praise the characterizations and don't bother explaining why. It would be easy to explain if the show presented as such? No?

I can't speak for anyone, but there's been plenty of slowly paced anime that have been able to deliver great characterization and story such as SE lain and Aoi Bungaku, that I'm afraid completely outclass Fate/Zero at this point. Not saying I don't like Fate/Zero and it has plenty of room to develop and get better, but really there's also plenty of room for criticizing this episode in particular.

It's just that at this moment, there are much more interesting characters such as Rider and such and some less important ones. My enjoyment goes down without their presence.

Usually it's a good idea to mix in more events with dialogue after all. This is a different medium.

Don't take this as an insult; I'm just bringing in there's one way of viewing this episode as not that great without having a mental disorder.

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Guild Wars 2 SN: ArchonWing.9480 (Stormbluff Isle)MyAnimeList || Reviews

7/10.
Not because of the censorship, not because of the 'too much talking', not because of no Rider and our heroine Waver...
Only for the poor figures in this episode. Iri's eyes are a little bit low and wide, Saber's neck too long, Keyneth's face in disorder and Sola should not be the someone fat like that...

And... that reminds me of a minor nitpick I forgot to mention. Don't Servants get up to date info on the modern world that summons them, as well as legendary historical figures (hence why most servants want to hide their real names)? Joan of Arc is one of the most well-known figures of history. I found it a bit surprising that Saber didn't know who Caster was confusing her with.

Granted, Joan of Arc came after King Arthur, but hey, this sort of thing doesn't stop Alexander the Great from being familiar with Grail-caliber historical figures that came after him.

Saber isn't dead. She never went to the Throne of Heroes and gain knowledge of all the heroes who lived after her. Servants have knowledge of the modern world when they get summoned but I assume that doesn't include an extensive historical lesson.